Wednesday, September 9, 2009

Crazy shit.

In the past couple of months, nearly one hundred people have ended up at my blog after Googling some variation of the phrase "crazy shit." I find this kind of hilarious. What are these people expecting to find? Is my post about Salvia divinorum satisfying their yearning for some crazy shit? Apparently there is a CrazyShit.com, which hosts mostly pornographic video clips, as well as other video clips which, based on a glance at the thumbnail screenshots, seem gross and disturbing to me.

But if you are looking for some crazy shit that is neither pornographic nor gross and disturbing, I guess I can make a few suggestions.

Lately I have been reading The Portable Jung. I haven't been reading it very quickly, because every time I encounter a new concept, I get all excited and inspired and distracted and overwhelmed with ideas of my own, and I have to make a concerted effort to drag my attention back to the text. So far it seems like a pretty good introduction to Jungian psychology. I would say that it qualifies as crazy shit.

I would also recommend Daniel Pinchbeck's Breaking Open the Head: A Psychedelic Journey into the Heart of Contemporary Shamanism to any casual reader looking for some crazy shit. Of all the books that I have read recently about psychedelic shamanism, I would say that this one is the breeziest and most entertaining.

Last month, Ed and I went to the San Francisco launch of The Journeybook, which is an exploration of consciousness, spirituality, and psychedelic culture through essays, interviews, and artwork. So far I have only flipped through it briefly, but I am certain that it contains a plenitude of crazy shit.

The other unread book lingering on my bookshelf is The Phenomenon of Man. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a French philosopher and Jesuit priest, wrote it in the 1930s, but the Roman Catholic Church prohibited its publication until his death in 1955. Teilhard's ideas about the evolution of consciousness sound totally crazy and also very appealing and exciting.

If you don't want a whole book's worth of crazy shit, you might be interested in the essays at Reality Sandwich. Some of them are a little too crazy, even for me.

Or, if you want some cinematic crazy shit, Ed and I have been getting into Hayao Miyazaki lately. We actually haven't seen Ponyo yet. But Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke, Kiki's Delivery Service, Howl's Moving Castle, and Laputa: Castle in the Sky are all very crazy and trippy and wonderful.

I think that's pretty much all the crazy shit I have to offer at the moment. If that wasn't what you were looking for...too bad.